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Chapter 2: Disaster RecoveryOverviewThe purpose of this chapter is to help you understand what we feel is the most critical job ofa system administrator—disaster recovery.We included this chapter at the beginning of our guidebook for two reasons: To emphasize the importance of the subjectDisaster recovery needs to be planned as soon as possible, because it takes time todevelop, test, and refine. To emphasize the importance of being prepared for a potential disasterMurphy’s Law says:“Disaster will strike when you are not prepared for it.”The faster you begin planning, the more prepared you will be when a disaster does happen.This chapter is not a disaster recovery “how to.” It is only designed to get you thinkingand working on disaster recovery.The goal of disaster recovery is to restore the system so that the company can continuedoing business. A disaster is anything that results in the corruption or loss of the R/3System.Examples include: Database corruption.For example when test data is accidentally loaded into the production system.This happens more often than people realize. A serious hardware failure. A complete loss of the R/3 System and infrastructure.For example, the destruction of the building due to natural disaster.The ultimate responsibility of a system administrator is to successfully restore R/3 after adisaster.The ultimate consequence of not restoring the system is that your company goes out ofbusiness.The administrator’s goal is to prevent the system from ever reaching the situation where theultimate responsibility is called upon.Disaster recovery planning is a major project. Depending on your situation and the size andcomplexity of your company, disaster recovery planning could take more than a year to2–2Release 4.6 A/B